Voice Messaging Services (VMS) are becoming increasingly important in today's communications markets. However, many users are not certain that their message has been received at the called station or by the intended recipient thereat. Consequently, confirmation of the receipt of the message is often requested by the calling party from the called party.
In one prior art VMS system where each message sender is a subscriber of the system, provisions are made for a message recipient's response to be stored in the user's mailbox. However, when the message sender is not a subscriber of the system, no mailbox exists and, consequently, no response can be received. Undesirably, system subscribers who receive messages from non-subscriber message senders are often requested to call the non-subscriber senders directly with their response which results in added time and, possibly, expense to the system subscribers.
The problem may be more acute when the VMS are provided by the public switched network, since a greater number of telephone users may not be subscribers to the VMS and, consequently, will not have the requisite message mailboxes to receive voice or confirmation messages. Thus, it is a continuing problem to provide message delivery confirmation and responses when providing VMS to users of the public switched network.